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# Replication Material for 
# Stefan Müller and Michael Jankowski:
# Do voters really prefer more choice? Determinants of support for personalised electoral systems.
# Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties.
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Abstract: Which voters prefer having more choice between parties and candidates in an election? To provide an answer to this question, we analyse the case of a radical change from a closed-list PR system to a highly complex open-list PR system with cumulative voting in the German states of Bremen and Hamburg. We argue that the approval of a personalised electoral system is structured in similar ways as support for direct democracy. Using representative surveys conducted prior to all four state elections under cumulative voting in 2011 and 2015, we analyse which individual factors determine the approval, disapproval or indifference towards the new electoral law. The results indicate that younger voters as well as supporters of left parties are much more likely to support a personalised electoral system. In contrast to previous studies, political interest only has an impact on the indifference towards the electoral system. More generally, our results show that a large proportion of voters does not appreciate personalised preferential electoral systems which seems to be a result of the complexity and magnitude of choice between parties and candidates. 


Information on the Replication Material

Please open the file bremen_hamburg_reform.Rproj and run the following scripts to reproduce the results.

* 01_prepare_data: shows how we merged the four election studies based on the raw data 
provided by GESIS (links to DOI of original datasets provided). Note that you can only 
run this script if you first register at GESIS and download the four survey files into the 
folder that contains the Rroj file. This file returns the dataset “hh_hb_11_15_prepared.dta”.


* 02_analyse_hh_hb: reproduces all regression models and predicted probabilities using 
“hh_hb_11_15_prepared.dta”. 
Note that Stata 13 (or higher) is required to run the script. Note that you will need to adjust the working directory at the beginning of the file to run the script successfully on another machine.


* 03_create_plots.R: creates all plots from the main paper and the appendix. 


* function_plot: function that is required to plot the files based on the predicted probabilities from Stata. 


The scripts were executed successfully with the following versions of the required packages (2018-08-27):

R version 3.5.0 (2018-04-23)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Sierra 10.12.6

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
 [1] srvyr_0.3.1     magrittr_1.5    haven_1.1.1     forcats_0.3.0   stringr_1.3.1  
 [6] dplyr_0.7.6     purrr_0.2.5     readr_1.1.1     tidyr_0.8.1     tibble_1.4.2   
[11] ggplot2_3.0.0   tidyverse_1.2.1